Lady Letitia Howard
was never going to get used to the tropical heat of the
Caribbean. She lay in her bed, thin nightgown already soaked with
sweat despite the fact the verandah doors were thrown open to try
and let some of the night breeze into the room. The mosquito net
surrounded her, necessary she knew but it just served to make her
feel hotter, more suffocated, imprisoned.

Her
late husband had brought her to this wild place, and now he was
dead she was looking forward to returning to the cool civilized
rooms of her London home. The man had been a fool. He should have
known he wasn't strong enough to withstand the rigours of a long
sea journey followed by a totally alien climate. He had succumbed
to a fever within months of arriving. Letitia, on the other hand,
had proven to be as strong as an ox.

However
strong she was, the nights were long, lonely and unbearably hot.
When the windows and doors were left open like this, the strange
sounds of insects and night creatures were deafening.

At some
point that night she must have dosed off, because she awoke with
a jerk. The candles were still burning, casting eerie shadows on
the white net surrounding her and she thought she had been woken
by a sound; not an animal sound, the sound a person would make.
She lay frozen on her back, nightgown twisted around her, trying
not to breathe.

Then
she heard it again; a shuffling, clothes brushing against
skin.

"Is
someone there?" she asked bravely.

And out
from the shadows came a voice, a deep male voice, causing
goosebumps to rise on her skin.

"Don't
move," it said.

It was
an uncivilized voice, low and rasping and commanding.

"If you
do as I say, you will come to no harm." He had an unmistakably
refined English accent. A very small comfort.

She sat
upright, defying his command not to move. "Show yourself," she
said, sounding more assertive than she felt. "What are you doing
in my room?"

She
peered into the darkness beyond the netting and saw a shape
moving towards the bed. He was tall and broad and she shivered,
wrapping her arms tightly around her legs. Then there was a glint
of steel and the netting was abruptly slit with a violent ripping
noise and two sun browned hands roughly tore the delicate
material from the bed.

Letitia
froze with fear and gazed up at her potential assailant. She had
never seen him before but she knew who he was. She could see the
infamous tattoo on the left side of his bare neck.

"The
Black Orchid," she said staring at him with wide eyes.

"Thomas
Ashdown at your service ma'am," he said smoothly, even bowing
slightly.

She had
heard so much about him even before she had come to Barbados, and
to find him standing at the end of her bed in the dead of night
was a surprising turn of events to say the least. Why he was
named after a flower, she had no idea. He was tall, well over six
feet. He was broad as well. She could see his wide shoulders
straining the white linen of his shirt and from the way he was
standing, hands resting high on the posts of her bed as he looked
down on her, she could see his arms were muscular. But it was his
face she found herself staring at. His head was shaven which
accentuated his fine cheekbones and even in the flickering
candlelight she could see his eyes were bright blue; unusual in a
man so dark.

She was
sitting in nothing but a thin nightgown, alone, completely
defenseless, with a strange man looming over her, gazing at her
with a worrying glint in his eyes. And to her horror, she felt a
fluttering of excitement.

He
continued to gaze down at her, a slight smile on his lips. In all
her imaginings she had never pictured a smiling pirate. She had
pictured pirates with long flowing hair, gripping cutlasses in
their teeth, growling grim obscenities, but had never imagined
them to be flesh and blood men, with well bred English accents.
The Black Orchid sounded like he was from the Home Counties, but
he most definitely did not look like he was, despite the
grin.

"What
are you doing in my room?" she eventually asked in a quavering
voice. His silent unabashed regard of her was making her
nervous.

"Your
husband owes me," he said.

"My
husband is dead. He died two weeks ago."

"I
know, but he still owes me."

Letitia
had a creeping feeling about what the repayment might be. "He had
many debts," she said. "He left me with just enough to return to
England."

"That's
a shame," he said softly, smiling again. He had the smile of a
wolf, slow and filled with self-assurance. His gaze travelled
over her body. She felt like helpless prey and she shivered
again, but not just from fear. He reached down and touched her
bare foot and she jumped.

"You have very pretty
toes," he whispered, running a finger across them.

He
could not have shocked her more.

His
blue eyes darkened as they ran across her body again and the room
suddenly closed in on them as the candlelight flickered. It was
just her and him and the bed and her breath caught in her throat.
No one would ever know, she found herself thinking. She suddenly
felt a desire to see him without his clothes, to find out what
those muscles looked like uncovered and as if he had read her
mind, he unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it off. His skin was
dark from the sun and his chest was strong and defined. A slight
covering of dark hair spread across his flat nipples and narrowed
into a line down his belly disappearing into his low-slung
britches.

"Something
tells me, you might not mind repaying your husband's debt," he
said in his rich cultivated voice. The contrast between what
Letitia heard and what she saw was creating a strange fire in her
belly.

Then
suddenly, the sword glinted in the candlight once again and she
was reminded that he was dangerous and according to legend, very
violent.

His
rough fingers grasped the hem of her nightgown and he gently
thrust the sharp blade into the fine linen. She fell backwards
and with a horrified gasp watched the pale material rip the
entire way up her body slowly exposing the creamy curves
underneath. His dark eyes feasted on her flesh as it was revealed
to him and he yanked away the remaining shreds of her nightgown
so she lay on the bed completely naked, frozen with fear and a
strange kind of excitement. As he stared at her she could feel
the stirring in her loins coil tighter. Right from the moment she
had heard his rough voice come from the shadows, her loins had
been hot and burning, and now she was squirming against the damp
sheets, unable to control these novel sensations.

She
looked down and saw that her nipples stood out impossibly erect
despite the heat of the thick air, and when he noticed them too
he licked his lips, the gleam of a predatory animal in his eyes.
The light of the candles reflected in the sheen of sweat on his
strong brown shoulders as he leaned towards her. She shuffled
further up the bed, her escape thwarted by the mahogany
headboard.

"Please,"
she whimpered, "What will you do to me?"

His
eyes were almost black now and his hand strayed to the waist of
his britches. She could see how the rough material strained over
his crotch and her eyes widened.

"You
were married," he growled, "You must know," and his hand stroked
over his huge bulge as he continued to stare at her
nipples.

"My
husband was ….a small man," she said, watching him slowly
unbuttoning his britches, her voice catching in her
throat.

He
laughed. It was not a joyous sound, but one full of experience
and bitterness and some pain. "Did he pleasure you?" he asked,
his hand gliding across his hard abdominal muscles, snaking along
the scar that ran diagonally across his torso.

Despite
her fear she was shamefully desperate for him to touch her. She
ignored the question. How could she answer it when she had
nothing to compare her husband to? She suspected the brief
fumblings her and the Earl had enjoyed in the dark every now and
again were not what this man defined as pleasure.

As she
pondered this, her legs relaxed slightly and opened enough to
give the man looming over her a glimpse of pale curls and
glistening pink lips. When he saw that she was wet, he groaned
and pulled his britches down in one swift maneuver. She remained
pressed against the cool wood of the headboard as he mounted the
bed and crawled towards her, dark eyes fixed on the prey between
her legs. Her knees involuntarily clamped protectively together
and his hand shot out and settled between them. The heat coming
from him was overpowering and it took just the slightest pressure
for her to open her legs again and she sighed as his hands ran
along the silky soft skin of her inner thighs.

"That's
it," he murmured, surprisingly gently, "open up for me," and his
lips shockingly joined his hands, brushing against her, moving
ever higher towards their goal.

She
gasped as a finger slowly slid between her folds. She had
expected something rough and brutal but this was a gentle,
teasing torture. Her hands gripped the bedhead and her hips
thrust towards him as his head dipped and his tongue lashed her.
He was making deep, eager little moans as he licked and sucked,
and his strong hands found her firm round bottom and gripped her,
thumbs adding to the torturous massage between her legs. Her head
was swimming; she was seeing stars. She had never known she could
feel like this. She wasn't sure she wanted to feel this giddy
lack of control, spread out like a wanton whore, totally naked to
the world, held firmly by the rough hands of an uncivilized,
untamed man.

She
lifted her heavy head from the wall to try and regain some
composure but looking down, saw a Pirate's savagely shaved head
between her legs and his strong brown shoulders shining with
beads of sweat, and the straining biceps patterned with exotic
tattoos, his dark skin creating a shocking contrast with her
paleness and she could feel an explosion coming upon her, but
before she could let go he suddenly pulled himself up, grabbed
hold of her ankles and roughly thrust his tool into her with a
hoarse groan. He went in so deep and hard, her eyes rolled back
in her head and as he thrust into her, an explosive ecstasy came
upon her, causing her to cry out incomprehensible words and
convulse around him as he continued to pound into her.

"That's
it," Thomas rasped, drinking in the long golden hair spread over
the pillows, and the elegant curve of her milky white neck as her
head was thrown back in a convulsive ecstasy. "Let go. Come for
me." She came so hard and for so long, that her muscles milked a
screaming orgasm out of him too. His spunk shot out of his balls
as if fired from a cannon, as he grabbed her soft arse and pulled
her more firmly onto him so he could pump inside her, releasing
every last bit of seed from his straining cock. Her nubile body
was still twitching and convulsing in his hands as he started
breathing again, and he had a sudden and violent desire to rip
the discarded nightgown into shreds and use it to tether her to
the posts of the bed, so he could repeat what they had just done
over and over again.